Trends in Mobile according (self-proclaimed) experts

So, what are the trends in Mobile? here are an odd fifty experts expressing their wisdom. What do you think?

Douglas Rushkoff

Author of Life Inc.

@rushkoff

rushkoff.com

ESP sensors. Probably based on brainwave activity. Not so hard.

Driving locks.

Implanted bluetooth ear and microphone.

Verizon abandons CDMA.

Radiation and brain damage documented.

Katrin Verclas

Co-founder & editor of MobileActive.org

@KatrinSkaya

mobileactive.org

Mobiles in social development will truly become an integral part of development projects and programmes with aid organizations understanding the potential of mobiles and smartly deploying mobile tech as part of their programmes. UNICEF and CONCERN will be at the vanguard.

Africa will see the first truly mobile political campaign. It’ll be likely in Nigeria in 2010.

Mobile payments will be widespread – for social benefit payments by governments, for remittances across borders, and for tax and other payments by citizens. This will make financial governance every so slightly more accountable in developing countries, and will begin to make a positive economic impact at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Health care delivery, especially in developing countries, will see some true breakthroughs withmore telemedicine projects like mobile ultrasound and other diagnostics. New business models involving medical expertise remotely will emerge so that the divide between healthcare between rich and poor areas will flatten.

Elections and other forms of political expression by citizens, government oversight will be radically different than they are today by way of mobile voting, mobiles for reporting and government accountability.

Environmental monitoring in the form of smart sensing devices will be part of everyday life with new forms of scientific environmental discovery and mitigation possible.

Things and services: The increasing connection between physical devices and online services will drive new applications that take personal data and turn it into useful, personal, social, visual and manipulable representations. With all of these personal activities that can be measured or ‘counted’ (Nike+, Wattson and Foursquare are prototypical) there is potential for a broad range of personal and public services.

Physical diversification: There will be an enormous physical diversification of connected devices. In many cases a connected object are no longer just ‘mobile’ but e-readers, cameras, music players, and household appliances all the way up to cars, public spaces and buildings (where there is a good reason to do so).

Daily data: As we begin to learn how to create and manipulate our online ‘data shadows’ that are created out of this data (cf. Mike Kuniavsky), this will have significant effects on everyday life and on our sense of value in personal information. The impact of this will be felt through changes in daily life that try to influence the ‘things that can be counted’.

Pervasive privacy: Because of the increased visibility of everyday activities, places, relationships, finances, health, etc. the issues around privacy will really come to a head. Not just the ‘big brother’ privacy issues that will be tested through the legal system, but really sticky, complex social and personal privacy issues that are difficult for technology alone to resolve (cf. Everyware).

Always-on backlash: In reaction to increased, pervasive connectivity, there must be an ‘alwayson backlash’ en masse. There will not just be niche communities choosing to ‘opt-out’, but it will become culturally, socially necessary and desirable to be offline. The ability to gracefully disconnect and go ‘dark’ must become a USP for many products and services.

Gerd Leonhard

Author & Blogger, Keynote

Speaker & Strategist

@gleonhard

mediafuturist.com

Mobile advertising will surpass the decidedly outmoded Web1.0 & computer-centric advertising – and ads will become content, almost entirely. Advertisers will, within 2-5 years, massively convert to mobile, location-aware, targeted, opt-ed-in, social and user-distributed ‘ads’; from 1% of their their budgets to at least 1/3 of their total advertising budget. Advertising becomes ‘ContVertising’ – and Google’s revenues will be 10x of what they are today, in 5 years, driven by mobile, and by video.

Tablet devices will become the way many of us will ‘read’ magazines, books, newspapers and even ‘attend’ live concerts, conferences and events. The much-speculated Apple iPad will kick this off but every major device maker will copy their new tablet within 18 months. In addition, tablets will kick off the era of mobile augmented reality. This will be a huge boon to the content industries, worldwide – but only if they can drop their mad content protection schemes, and slash the prices in return for a much larger user base.

Many makers of simple smart phones – probably starting with Nokia- will make their devices available for free – but will take a small cut (similar to the current credit-cards) from all transactions that are done through the devices, e.g. banking, small purchases, on-demand content etc. Mobile phones become wallets, banks and ATMs.

Quite a few mobile phones will not run on any particular networks, i.e. without SIM cards. The likes of Google (Nexus), and maybe Skype, LG or Amazon will offer mobile phones that will work only on Wifi / WiMax, LTE or mashed-access networks, and will offer more or less free calls. This will finally wake up the mobile network operators, and force them to really move up the food-chain – into content and the provision of ‘experiences’

Content will be bundled into mobile service contracts, starting with music, i.e. once your mobile phone / computer is online, much of the use of the content (downloaded or streamed) will be included. Bundles and flat-rates – many of them Advertising 2.0-supported – will become the primary way of consuming, and interacting with content. First music, then books, new and magazines, then film & TV.

Fabien Girardin

Researcher at Lift lab

@fabiengirardin

liftlab.com/

Web of things: an average networked pet will have a voice, generating more data traffic than the average human

Convergence enables the blending of reality from online and off so there is no distinction

The communications revolution accelerates destroying businesses that refuse to think the unthinkable

Martin Duval

CEO bluenove

@bluenove

bluenove.com

Still to come ‘Easy Back Up & Storage’ of Address Book, mobile content and now Apps in case phone is lost, stolen or changed

Emotions and social network recommendation based mobile search

Mobile payment and transfer (in Europe)

SMS based Health & Wellness monitoring and coaching

‘Green Tech’ phones and in emerging countries, self-repairable ones

Mobile battery performance and charging solutions

Tony Fish

Entrepreneur & strategic thinker AMF Ventures

@TonyFish

tonyfish.com

Connection managers. They will become critical for differentiation as devices will be able to handle massive data speeds for microseconds and limited data speeds for hours; from any available network.

User Interface. Mashup interfaces across voice, touch and movement will create new experiences for getting data into and controlling mobile devices. Open (environments) will change the game.

Sensors. Mobile devices will have sensors added which will enable the capture local data from temperature to noise and from location to who else is in the room.

Business model. Based on game changes 2 and 3, brands realize that more value is created from the analysis of sensor data taken off the mobile devices than from user voice or data usage analysis. Combining the two, sensor and user data, it will be possible to generate new business models and shareholder value.

Ownership of your data footprint. Every brand wants to own you and your data. Users will become discriminating about brands who deliver value to them and these will be different from those who are in the mobile retail value chain today. Trust and privacy will be at the forefront of the user decision. http://www.mydigitalfootprint.com

Ilja Laurs

Founder and CEO of GetJar

@getjar

getjar.com

It’s all about phones. 50% hardware, 50% software and services (UI, widgets, integrated services, etc.). Apps and app stores are important (just as platforms are), but the consumer will see a leapfrog in devices, equivalent to BW (representing today’s featurephones) to colour (representing todays’ smartphones) devices shift. 2011, with smartphone being the mainstream device, to the contrary, will be much less about devices and much more about apps and services, call the “second wave of apps”.

We will see several app successes ($10m/yr businesses built on apps) in 2010, but massive app successes will come in 2011/12, the industry will see $100m/yr businesses built on apps

Certainly 2010 is the year of app stores “opening”. Unfortunately there’s no definition of what is “open” (every app store calls itself open, still some reject voice/navigation, etc. apps based on their competing business model and not on the user experience, quality or other objective measures. But even taking to quality and other objective measures, open for GJ means that it is the consumer decides what quality is acceptable). 2010 will certainly see all appstores being more open than in 2009, still in general there will still be a lot of questions.

Contextual Information Provision: Provision of information based on LIVE information gathered through sensory input from all elements in your context.

Personal Area Networks: many hardware mutants and spinoffs.

Russell Buckley

VP Global Alliances AdMob & Chairman

Emeritus Mobile Marketing Association

@russellbuckley

mobhappy.com

All urban areas offer free (or funded by tax payer) Wimax connectivity, meaning that most people don’t bother with an operator relationship any more. Landlines are gone.

Mobile overtakes the PC as the largest marketing channel, offering the best results and tracking in the history of marketing.

Current handheld form factors disappear, with interfaces being via glasses or contact lenses, a microscopic ear piece and a device which we can envision as a ring for the finger. Three options of viewing will be available, Real World, Digital World and a combination of the two ie Augmented Reality. In this Post PC Era, laptops will be quaintly old-fashioned and unsupported commercially.

Mobile product and service innovation will be greatly influenced in the next 10 years by emerging markets, who already live in the Post PC Era today. Education is the first vertical to be hugely impacted.

People still won’t pay for Digital Content.

Tomi Ahonen

Author

@tomiahonen

tomiahonen.com

Shrinking superphone reaches 10 dollar cost; better than iPhone of today. Moore’s Law brings us ever cheaper phones so cheap ‘Africa’ phones and kids’ phones in 2020 are better than modern top end phones of 2010, like Nokia N900, Google Nexus and Apple iPhone 3GS. Better phones will be used at work and play, top end ‘smartphones’ will be embedded within humans enhancing our vision, hearing, memory etc.

Mobile advertising becomes biggest ad platform. Mobile advertising grows to become biggest ad platform exceeding TV and internet by reach and by ad revenues. Mobile ads mature beyond banner ads and SMS spam, become ever more compelling and ‘engaging’. Will not kill off other older media like TV, print and internet, as each will adjust to the newest medium.

Half of total economy in many countries transits mobile phone payments. The rapid growth of mobile banking and credit will change the payments systems of all countries. Combined with interactive ads, mobile money will shift phone to mobile wallet with our keys and loyalty points and identity cards. In all countries normal to get paycheck paid to phone, in many leading m-banking countries, where traditional banking institutions are weak like in Africa, more than half of total economy will pass through mobile phones.

“Star Trek Universal Translator’ is commonplace. The early translator utilities of today will evolve and by end of decade, all standard phone feature near-real time ‘accurate’ translators in voice-to-voice and text-to-text (and across voice/text/voice). You point the phone at speaker in foreign language, your earpiece hears the simultaneous translation as if UN professional translator stood next to you.

Our phone becomes magical servant as concierge. The early mobile concierge services like from Japan today evolve. As our payments and media and calendar info is integrated, the concierge avatar on the phone adds ‘secretary’, ‘butler’, ‘accountant’ and ‘lawyer’ functions to assist us, like Amazon today anticipates and ‘reads our minds’ of what book to recommend, the phone servant avatar in 2020 will run our lives, answer our calls, send messages on behalf of us, order goods and services, and give us reminders.

Stefan Constantinescu

Editor, Intomobile

@GJCAG

intomobile.com

A device as powerful as the iPhone 3GS is today will cost less than 100 EUR by 2016 thereby enabling a whole new economic strata rich mobile access to the internet.

NFC will drastically take off and similar to how today it’s impossible to buy a mobile phone without a camera, that point will be reached with NFC by the tail end of the next decade.

Rich nations will start seeing the number of hours people spend in front of screens decline for the first time and the masses will limit or stop use a certain technology or service to reconnect with the joys of overcoming an obstacle.

People will pay for content again, especially mobile content since mobile advertising takes up valuable screen real estate, because operator billing will finally replace the piece of plastic in your wallet.

Thanks to Bluetooth and wireless display technology the mobile phone will literally be the only computer people own.

Rich Wong

Partner at Accel Partners

@rich_wong

facebook.com/accel

Over 50% of the world’s households carry a mobile device – 3B+ (think about that, how cool is that, what will it mean for societal integration)

Mobile internet surpasses the wireline internet in global REACH (more people with IP connections in mobile than PCs)

Smart Agents 2.0 (Thank you Patty Maes) become real; the ability to deduce/impute context from blend of usage and location data (privacy issues need to be handled of course)

Marshall Kirkpatrick

VP of Content Development & Lead Blogger

ReadWriteWeb

@marshallK

readwriteweb.com

Mobile content recommendation

Lifestream integration with mobile contacts lists

Mobile data portability and data portability via mobile

Mobile commerce

Location-based social networking

Andy Abramson

CEO, Comunicano, blog author of VoIPWatch & Working Anywhere

@andyabramson

andyabramson.blogs.com/voipwatch

Cheaper Data plans, more Pay As You Go Data with Global Roamingwith LTE and WiMax bundles and buckets become like minutes. Watch the rates start to fall as the operators need more customers to support new capex spending and as they begin to leverage already established networks.

The Network Becomes Paramount as Devices all become Smarter – With WiMax, Mobile WiMax and WiFi-this means faster, better and cheaper data, video and voice. Newer smart devices both diverged and converged all proliferate, and will all compliment the 3G expansion plans and 4G (LTE) roll outs. Connectivity becomes ubiquitous and the idea of always on, becomes commonplace. Without a well run network, none of this grows.

Mobile PBX/Nomadic Mobile Enterprise Offerings-the largest customer market is the enterprise for mobile, yet we can’t transfer a call after almost 30 years of calling. A mobile PBX will change all that

The rise of new device brands-Nokia, Ericsson and others had a cozy ride for years with the mobile operators. Now the rising tigers from Asia (Asus, Garmin/Acer, Huawei, ZTE will start to encroach with better priced, more feature rich handsets, mostly built on Android and with data at the core. Motorola rises like a Phoenix, INQ becomes an emerging force and HTC becomes a bigger part of the game with more operators. Unlocked handsets become a bigger part of mix in countries where it never was a factor.

Google will be a trend changer doing for mobile what Yahoo never could achieve.

Marek Pawlowski

Founder, MEX Mobile User

Experience Conference

@marekpawlowski

pmn.co.uk/mex/

Keyboard dimensions and screen size cease to be the primary limiting factors in handset design as new input and display technologies free designers to radically change the form factor of personal communication devices.

Services and content are purchased once and accessible across all devices (PC, mobile, TV etc…) as business models start to reflect the reality of consumer value perception.

The most successful network operators will narrow their focus to the ‘3 Cs’: customer service, coverage and capacity, stepping away from large-scale portal, application and media development efforts.

Russ McGuire

VP, Strategy, Sprint Nextel

@mcguireslaw

mcguireslaw.com/

Just as microprocessors have been built into virtually every product that has a power source, over the next ten years, it will become expected that wireless connectivity will be built into virtually every product that has a microprocessor.

Businesses will redefine virtually every internal process and virtually every service they offer customers to leverage wireless access to information and contextual data to create new value for customers, to grow their addressable markets, and to reduce their operating costs.

Fixed line broadband will overshoot the performance needs of the market, resulting in increasing data cord cutting as individuals, families, and businesses appreciate the value of mobility more than the value of excess bandwidth.

By the end of the decade, mobile devices will be thought of first for the applications they run rather than for their ability to make voice calls.

The #1 trend for me for the next decade will be ubiquity: everybody will have mobile data access. People in developing nations will get online on mobiles before they do on PCs; and in developed nations, mobile data use will become the norm for all users.

Tools that help people manage their constant connectivity will be in great demand.

The mobile phone will evolve into an enabler device, carrying users’ digital identities, preferences and possessions around with them.

Advanced mobile phone technology will become a commodity, and form will take precedence over function.

Privacy and protection of identity will create huge conflicts in many societies.

Howard Rheingold

Author of Smart Mobs

@hrheingold

rheingold.com

Distribution of sms-equipped and then increasingly smart phones in the developing world.

The use of environmental and biomedical sensors in conjunction with mobile communication media.

Augmented reality.

Mobile Social Software.

Steve O’Hear

Editor, last100

Contributing Editor, TechCrunch Europe

@sohear

last100.com

As phones get smarter, pipes get dumber. In the era of app stores and handset makers launching their own Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, mobile carriers will continue to struggle with the issue of who ‘owns’ the customer. Terrified of becoming a dumb pipe reduced to selling commodity voice and data services, some will try to innovate with their own SaaS products, most of which will fail, while the smartest players will partner and invest in innovate startups. That said, as the pipes get increasingly clogged up carrying all of this data, and with the advent of 4G, networks will start to focus on and highlight their competitiveness based on infrastructure and capacity alone.

increasingly, provide a ubiquitous Internet connection. Just like the best camera is the one that you have with you, more and more hardware functionality, such as innovative input devices and sensors, combined with software and a data connection will piggyback the mobile phone, rather than try to compete as a separate device. Health care will be a major benefactor.

Money transfer beyond mobile banking. The mobile phone will replace your wallet. Not only will you be able to manage your money via your mobile phone and use it to pay for products in authorized retail outlets both online and offline, but mobile money transfer will extend to peer-to-peer. Everyone will become a walking ‘cash’ register.

Battery technology will finally catch up. The combination of new types of battery technology and less power hungry chips will lead to mobile phones, even under the strain of all of this new hardware, software and data functionality, being able to stay powered up for more than a day. Perhaps days. Evidenced by the recent Netbook phenomenon, with 7+ hours becoming the norm for a low cost 10inch laptop.

People will share more and more personal information. Both explicit e.g. photo and video uploads or status updates, and implicit data. Location sharing via GPS (in the background) is one current example of implicit information that can be shared, but others include various sensory data captured automatically via the mobile phone e.g. weather, traffic and air quality conditions, health and fitness-related data, spending habits etc. Some of this information will be shared privately and one-to-one, some anonymously and in aggregate, and some increasingly made public or shared with a user’s wider social graph. Companies will provide incentives, both at the service level or financially, in exchange for users sharing various personal data.

Ted Morgan

CEO Skyhook Wireless

@tedmorgan

skyhookwireless.com

Device makers will continue to drive the mobile industry and operators will become more traditional service providers competing on cost and network quality.

Brands will use apps to drive hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. Apps will become a core revenue generator for businesses.

Location will become THE core technology to mobile devices. It will become more ubiquitous on the device than any other feature. nearly every user interaction with mobile devices will become location aware.

Location based advertising will explode. The classic starbucks example will be forgotten. That starbucks example is driven by a mindset stuck in the web – pop-up ads, banner ads. Apps and the mobile web will be location aware, and most mobile advertising will be informed and targeted by location.

Venture capitalists will begin to make major strategic investments in mobile app companies in 2010 (like the 2009 investments in Shazam, Smule, etc). Big brands will acquire small apps that enhance their product offering (eg Amazon & SnapTell)

Kevin C. Tofel

Managing Editor at jkOnTheRun, a GigaOM

network site covering mobile technology

@KevinCTofel

jkOnTheRun.com

Cellular voice dies — it truly becomes another form of data on next generation data networks

Connectivity lines blur — devices and apps will seamlessly function offline nearly as well as online

Handhelds — fewer laptops will be carried as more capable handheld devices will mature

Jonathan MacDonald

Founder, JME

@jmacdonald

jme.net

Convergence of virtual and physical payments: mobile payments will significantly replace physical currency. Within this trend I predict the replication of financial services from the past, onto cloudbased systems that can be managed by mobile devices, be they loans, savings, payments and transfers.

Convergence of mobile network and data services: IP technology will replace the need for cell towers. Within this trend I predict that ISP and web based services (including Google) will inherit the current subscribers of many mobile networks of today.

Convergence of utility payment: our payment for services will move away from separate contracts from service providers, to combined solutions placing data alongside gas, electricity and water. I predict single subscriptions to data services from commodity suppliers, supplemented with personalization tools that suit our precise requirements at any given moment.

Convergence of mobile and online platforms: the emergence of personal, unified cloudbased platforms that are accessible from any machine and screen.

Convergence of physical, augmented and virtual reality: augmented and virtual reality will become an increasingly standard method for search, discovery, gaming, eyesight, healthcare, retail, entertainment and most other experiences in life. Location and other contextual functions will grow so our 2D mobile experiences become 3D and ‘real’. To such an extent that the prefixes ‘augmented’ and ‘virtual’ will eventually become redundant.

Mobiles as universal remote controls for life – a conductor’s baton as much as a viewing portal

Michael Breidenbruecker

ceo RjDj

@byzo

rjdj.me

Mobile Networks: Imagine mobile networks without voice services. The switch from 3g standards into all IP network infrastructure (4g) will turn mobile operators to broadband providers, decrease the revenues of cable companies, increase profits of voip services and spawn a new range of mobile services, mobile apps and even mobile devices.

Mobile Internet: Internet usage through mobile devices will overtake desktop/pc usage based on massive adaptation of mobile internet in the developing world.

Mobile Payment: the mobile is the credit card.

Mobile Entertainment: Games, Music and Movies will find new formats on mobile devices especially through the rise of augmented reality technology. A handful of startups in this sector will manage to attract significant audiences.

Mobile Hub: Laptop schlepping will be over cause your phone will fulfill your computing needs. Smartphones will become as powerful as laptops and take over the laptop and notebook market. With an increasing number of peripherals from keyboards to displays to 3d glasses the mobile will become the power processor of your life. Don’t loose it!

Henri Moissinac

head of mobile, Facebook

@moissinac

facebook.com

Use cases: Phones are the primary computer and tool for connecting and sharing with friends (= more email or messages initiated from mobile phones to friends (not work) than from computer or netbooks)

Network: Wifi deployed widely (everywhere: at home, in restaurants, in the street, etc.)

Platforms: consolidation of platforms, may be only 2 or 3 gather 80% of units shipped

Hardware: significant advance in batteries

Andreas Constantinou

Ph.D., Research Director, VisionMobile

@andreascon

visionmobile.com/blog

The Operator Dichotomy: Mobile operators will clearly separate into service companies (service pipes) and access companies (bit pipes). Very few multi-nationals will control assets to both services and access.

OEMs as the service inventory brokers: Handset OEMs will move to exploit one of their few unique strengths; service distribution inventory on-device and therefore monetise from retailing and managing services at point-of-purchase and during in-life use.

Application Mega-retailing: Retailing and merchandising of mobile apps will evolve in terms of segmentation, regionalisation and sophistication, and far more so than mobile phone retailing. A large chunk of the money in apps will go towards distribution and retailing, much like the book business is today.

Service Analytics: The Most Underhyped opportunity. Comprehensive analytics on devices, services, networks and users will create major new revenue streams; from monetising competitive intelligence to spawning new revenue models such as OEMs being paid based on device performance.

Open Source Economics Mastered: Multi-billion firms will realise that ‘influence is power’ in the world of open source and will either acquire the small 10-strong professional services firms or reorient their business culture towards upstream tribes, rather than downstream troops.

C. Enrique Ortiz

Mobile Technologist, blogger

@eortiz

cenriqueortiz.com

The mobile lifestyle truly goes beyond “carrying a mobile handset all the time”. The next decade will see the first true always-on/connected generation – “99% messaging, media and entertainment, 1% voice”-kind of mobile users. Mobile usage drivers are as follows: 1) (people-to-people) messaging, very media and social in nature including text, MMS, real-time web and social networks, 2) media – photos, video and music, gaming, 3) info/search or queries, 4) voice. Voice usage will be very minimal when compared to messaging, and messaging and media go hand-in-hand with media usage driven by personal messaging.

Control totally shifts from the MNO and into the ecosystem. MNOs become a positive member of and contributor to the ecosystem and the developer community. The MNO extends and offers their mobile/wireless infrastructure as services on the Internet (Infrastructure as a Services).

Wireless networks reaches sufficient speeds and efficiencies that minimizes and almost eliminate most of the connection latencies that currently degrades the mobile web usage experience, resulting in an increased positive perception of mobile web and allowing for mobile web applications that complement and/or rival local/native mobile apps. HSPA+ becomes the predominant type of wireless network during the first half of the decade with LTE on the later part. Data plans go from unlimited pricing, to handsetspecific (attempt to maximize revenue) pricing and tiered-pricing (to force users to use less data), back to unlimited (once networks become more efficient).

Distribution is 80% Smart-phones and 20% Feature-phones, worldwide. Feature-phones have 80% ofSmart-phone characteristics. Even in emerging regions such as Africa the business models is figured out to allow for “data” to take off; but it will take to the end of the decade for this. Most device manufacturers trying to copy Apple introduce their own OSes only to fail and instead go with Android due to economics – by leveraging Google’s R&D and BOM, are able to deliver a complete platform from OS, developer and ecosystem support in the most cost-effective way. Fragmentation problem continues from apps to web but reduced to a small number of platforms. Java ME focuses on Feature-phones. HTML and scripting with the browser/web-runtimes and handset APIs evolve and get standardized allowing for web applications that when combined with fast networks truly rival and/or complement local/ native applications. App Stores offer both local/native and mobile web apps. There are many App Stores which are easily discovered and selected by users – which app store to use becomes a user-preference/choice.

Messaging becomes the top application. Search/queries and apps in general benefit from the digital and physical worlds merging together, thanks to the mobile handset; awareness of our surroundings via proximity and other sensors such as geo-location allows for high-definition user-context. Super-imposition of information on top of real word imagery (Augmented Reality) and interactions with physical objects via the handset (to learn more about such objects) becomes a common tool and exercise. AR becomes standardized and absorbed into the web browser as a View, similar to today’s “street vs. map view”. We start to see the initial phase of the 5th screen, “visors” that work together with the mobile handset extending digital augmentation from the handset screen (the 4th screen) onto “eye-glasses” (the 5th screen). The handset is the personal gateway, between personal sensors and services and applications and to the Internet. The hybrid application (80% local driving richness and experience and 20% generic/related web-based information) becomes the standard mobile app design pattern.

Operators build and market their own mobile devices competing with OEMs

Wireless charging becomes the standard and is available everywhere

Your super-modular mobile phone will be powered by a cloud based OS

You will travel to go to a no-airwaves National Park; the first cellular reserve

Marc Davis

Chief Scientist and Co-Founder, Invention Arts

@marcedavis

inventionarts.com

Web4 Metadata for All Data: Mobile transforms the Web into Web4: billions of mobile devices as sensors in a sensor network connect the Web to real people (Who), places (Where), objects (What), and times (When), analyzable into vectors of attention, interests, activities, and events. The masses of global data are no longer abstract bits in databases, but are made intelligible with real world metadata about the contexts in which they are produced, shared, consumed, and transformed.

MyWorld/OurWorld/TheirWorld: Web4 transforms our relationship to the world, each other, and ourselves. As every physical entity (person, place, object) becomes connected and programmable, and every digital entity is contextualized and can communicate with the real world, the now visible and permanent accretions of human attention and activity transform how we communicate with each other and understand the world around us. We see the datasphere mapped onto the world, and the world as it exists in the Web, from our own personalized point of view, from that of our friends and those we follow, and from the vantage point of others we do not know, and at scales from personal, to social, to global. The mobile phone is a prosthetic connecting us to our collective embodied intelligence in real time and across time and space: large scale information filtering, summarization, discovery, and recommendation become basic modes of engagement with ourselves, each other, and the world.

Mobile Transforms Global Business: Commerce is transformed as every place, object, person, and process is embedded in Web4. Mobile commerce becomes long tail, real time, and real world on a global scale. Location-awareness, mobile social networks, mobile transactions, and the Internet of Things bring about a new industrial revolution. Business processes are reengineered as mobile sensing, communication, and processing make supply and the organization of labor and markets real time, contextual, and adaptive. Human, computational, and physical resources can be assembled and integrated in real time to solve problems and create value: context-aware mobile sensors/effectors, crowdsourcing, smart mobs, and chains social networks are seen as the new drivers of value production.

The World Sees and Hears Itself: The Web and we get eyes and ears at global scale: billions of mobile phones with sensors and HD and 3D imaging, audio, and video combined with large scale real time filtering, communication, and recommendation technology transform news, entertainment, communication, education, work, and play. We create and use collective maps of human attention, interest, and activity in real time mapped to an ever-evolving 4 dimensional model of the world: “the Web of the World”. Billions of mobile media datastreams indexed and correlated with Web4 metadata show us and connect us to what is happening, has happened, and may happen all over the world.

User Data Banking: If user data is the currency of the information economy, then where are the banks? By 2020, mobile data and transactions connected to Web4 metadata create massive new value by radically transforming our ability to understand where and when who is interested in what. Given regulatory and societal pressures, the ownership and control of user data is placed in our hands. We gain control of what we make and do online and in the world. New legal and technical structures change the terms of service for the mobile ecosystem bringing about a range of new value creation and services based on the ownership, control, aggregation, and exchange of personal data (e.g., searches, interests, location, communications, social media, transactions, health data, etc.) by users and trusted intermediaries.

David Harper

Co-founder & CEO, PercentMobile

@davidharper

percentmobile.com

Unofficial currencies gain power.

Login will replace SIM cards.

Some nations will grant its people the right to a cellphone.

Appearance of a massively destructive synchronized mobile virus.

North Korea will join the Web.

Loic Le Meur

Founder & CEO of Seesmic / Founder of

LeWeb.net conference / blogger

@loic

seesmic.com

mobile web traffic surpasses desktop web traffic

mobile apps revenue surpasses desktop apps revenue

augmented reality becomes standard

no more mobile screen it becomes contact lenses, embedded in reading/sunglasses or projected on walls and objects

we finally solve the battery life issue and mobiles can stay up for a week of intense use

Ajit Jaokar

founder futuretext

@AjitJaokar

futuretext.com

Smart grids

Tradeoff of mobile information vs privacy vs services

Innovation from emerging markets

3D content driven by movies like avatar

‘open’ including net neutrality

Inma Martinez

entrepreneur, investor, strategist

@inma_martinez

stradbrokeadvisors.com

Mobiles and Netbooks begin their world domination path as browserdriven apparatuses

Home apps like tv programming and other wired appliances are operated from mobiles in big scale

Android takes over iPhone as its cloud features embrace social web better than apple

Mobile advertising revenues dent internet ad revenues by end of year. It is a business very much rolling out.

Ubiquity of mobile broadband will lead to an explosion of connected devices (à la Kindle, not just phones) and M2M services (machines to machine services, without a human behind the device). In 10 year, more devices/machines connected to the mobile network than humans

Truly context aware mobile computing, where the context is far richer than just location and personalization and recommendations are ubiquitous

Convergence of desktop and mobile web into one web, everything moving to the cloud and the end of native mobile applications and applications stores

App Stores will start to support applications for Embedded Devices – In 2010 we will see the emergence of applications for set-top boxes, netbooks, refrigerators, car navigation systems etc. Selected app stores will support these applications.

Decline of Native App Store Development – By 2011 native application development for app stores will start losing importance.

Mobile & Gaming – By 2014 browser-based gaming on embedded devices – including mobile – will have displaced much of the current console market in the Western World.

Mobile & TV/Home Entertainment – By 2016 browser-based entertainment/TV devices – relying on search – will have displaced television as the focal living room device in most of the Western World.

Tom Hume

Managing Director of Future Platforms

@twhume

tomhume.org/

More fluid use of input mechanisms beyond the keyboard. We’re seeing this right now with Google Goggles, Voice Search, AR (which is about location+bearing+camera), but what about proximity, use of ambient sound, time-of-day, etc?

Mobile as prime means of access online. Mind you I said this 10 years ago.

Improved power distribution: boring but necessary, battery technology needs to get much better to support more capable devices, or we’ll start to see new ways to power handsets.

Bandwidth gets higher; who knows what we’ll do with it, but it’ll happen.

Lots of second-order effects of mobile on society. No-one predicted the loosening of time and space that Mimi Ito has noted. Similarly, what happens to our social arrangements when every photo can be face-recognised, geolocated and individuals tracked? What happens to shops when every price can be compared? What happens to conversation when it’s all recorded, or any fact is a 5-second voice-search away from being checked?

About Future Case

Future Case is an aggregation space about mobile life, business modeling, marketing and branding. The content is chosen from a number of sites that are serious on their matter. Authors can contribute. Please contact Kees.

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